What’s in a name?

We are going to be blessed with our first grandbaby at the end of this year, and we’re beyond thrilled. We visited our son and his wife over the Labor Day weekend and they are just so cute together. It’s a heady time during the “expecting”, and I can see our son is even more in love with his wife than ever. It melts my heart.

As they ponder boy and girl names for the bambino (gender will remain unknown until delivery), we are pondering what to be called as his/her grandparents. This naming, as with the child’s naming, is not trivial. They will be used for the rest of our lives by this and all succeeding grandchildren as well as by our children when referring to us. Neither of us really feels like Grandma and Grandpa kinda people – definitely not Grandmother and Grandfather – but what names do feel right? Do we go for something hip and cool (one hip friend wants to be called GDaddy) or something more common? How best to capture our personalities, yet make it easy on the kiddos?

When I was very little, my brother and I apparently had a hard time pronouncing Grandma when addressing our live-in grandmother. Family lore says her name morphed into Nama, and she proudly answered to that the rest of her life. (Our live-in grandfather, by contrast, was called Dad because that’s what our mom called him. Slightly confusing to a young brain, but our dad became Daddy and it was settled.)

When my siblings started having children, my mom decided she would continue the grandmother-called-Nama tradition. My dad became Poppie because that’s a nickname my mom would sometimes call him. Nama and Poppie seemed to fit them, so it was all good.

For some reason, I’m just not feeling like a Nama. Going my own way? Looking for something more personal? Who knows. Am I spending way too much time thinking about this? Undoubtedly. But somehow it’s important to me to get it right.

So I’m on a mission to find just the right name, one I’ll love hearing in a squeal of joy as our grandkids see us (well, hopefully it’s joy), and especially one they can pronounce when they’re very little.